Anno Dracula (75 page)

In no sense ‘a real film’,
El conde Dràcula
is a scrapbook of images from the novel and Welles’s imagination. He told Henry Jaglom that he considered the project a private exercise, to keep the subject in his mind, a series of sketches for a painting he would execute later. As Francis Coppola would in 1977, while his multi-million-dollar
Dracula
was bogged down in production problems in Romania, Welles often made comparisons with the Sistine Chapel.

In 1973, Welles assembled some
El conde Dràcula
footage, along with documentary material about the real Count Dracula and the scandals that followed his true death in 1959: the alleged, much-disputed will that deeded much of his vast fortune to English housewife Vivian Nicholson, who claimed she had encountered Dracula while on a school holiday in the early ’50s; the autobiography Clifford Irving sold for a record-breaking advance in 1971, only to have the book exposed as an arrant fake written by Irving in collaboration with Fred Saberhagen; the squabbles among sundry vampire elders, notably Baron Meinster and Princess Asa Vajda, as to who should claim the Count’s unofficial title as ruler of their kind, King of the Cats. Welles called this playful, essay-like film -constructed around the skeleton of footage shot by Calvin Floyd for his own documentary,
In Search of Dracula
(1971) -
When Are You Going to Finish el conde Dràcula
?, though it was exhibited in most territories as
D is for Dracula.
On the evening Premier Ceauşescu withdrew the Romanian Cavalry needed for Coppola’s assault on Castle Dracula in order to pursue the vampire banditti of the Transylvania Movement in the next valley, Francis Ford Coppola held a private screening of
D is for Dracula
and cabled Welles that there was a curse on anyone who dared invoke the dread name.

Welles’s final Dracula project came together in 1981, just as the movies were gripped by a big vampire craze. Controversial and slow-building, and shut out of all but technical Oscars, Coppola’s
Dracula
proved there was a substantial audience for vampire subjects. The next half-decade would see Werner Herzog’s
Renfield, Jeder fur Sich und die Vampir Gegen Alle,
a retelling of the story from the point of the fly-eating lunatic (Klaus Kinski); of Tony Scott’s
The Hunger,
with Catherine Deneuve and David Bowie as New York art patrons Miriam and John Blaylock at the centre of a famous murder case defended by Alan Dershowitz (Ron Silver); of John Landis’s
Scream, Blacula, Scream,
with Eddie Murphy as Dracula’s African get Prince Mamuwalde, searching for his lost bride (Vanity) in New York - best remembered for a plagiarism lawsuit by screenwriter Pat Hobby that forced Paramount to open its books to the auditors; of Richard Attenborough’s bloated, mammoth, Oscar-scooping
Varney,
with Anthony Hopkins as Sir Francis Varney, the vampire Viceroy overthrown by the Second Indian Mutiny; of Brian DePalma’s remake of
Scarface,
an explicit attack on the Transylvania Movement, with Al Pacino as Tony Sylvana, a Ceausescu cast-out rising in the booming drac trade and finally taken down by a Vatican army led by James Woods.

Slightly ahead of all this activity, Welles began shooting quietly, without publicity, working at his own pace, underwritten by the last of his many mysterious benefactors. His final script combined elements from Stoker’s fiction with historical fact made public by the researches of Raymond McNally and Radu Florescu - associates as far back as
D is for Dracula
- and concentrated on the last days of the Count, abandoned in his castle, awaiting his executioners, remembering the betrayals and crimes of his lengthy, weighty life. This was the project Welles called
The Other Side of Midnight.
From sequences filmed as early as 1972, the director culled footage of Peter Bogdanovich as Renfield, while he opted to play not the stick insect vampire but the corpulent slayer, finally gifting the world with his definitive Professor Van Helsing. If asked by the trade press, he made great play of having offered the role of Dracula to Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen or Robert De Niro, but this was a conjurer’s distraction, for he had been fixed on his Count for some years and was now finally able to fit him for his cape and fangs. Welles’s final Dracula was to be John Huston.

Welles began filming
The Other Side of Midnight
on the old Miracle Pictures lot, his first studio-shot - though independently-financed - picture since
Touch of Evil
in 1958, and his first ‘right of final cut’ contract since
Citizen Kane.
The ins and outs of the deal have been assessed in entire books by Peter Bart and David J. Skal, but it seems that Welles, after a career of searching, had found a genuine ‘angel’, a backer with not only the financial muscle to give him the budget and crew he needed to make a film that was truly his vision, but also the self-effacing trust to let him have total artistic control of the result.

There were nay-saying voices and the industry was already beginning to wonder whether still in-progress runaway budget auteur movies like Michael Cimino’s
The Lincoln County Wars
or Coppola’s
Dracula
follow-up
One From the Heart
were such a great idea, but Welles himself denounced those runaways as examples of fuzzy thinking. As with his very first
Dracula
movie script and
Kane
,
The Other Side of Midnight
was meticulously pre-planned and pre-costed. Forty years on from
Kane
, Welles must have known this would be his last serious chance. A Boy Wonder no longer, the pressure was on him to produce a ‘mature masterpiece’, a career book-end to the work that had topped so many Best of All Time lists and eclipsed all his other achievements. He must certainly have been aware of the legion of cineastes whose expectations of a film that would eclipse the flashy brilliance of the Coppola version were sky-rocketing. It may be that so many of Welles’s other projects were left unfinished deliberately, because their creator knew they could never compete with the imagined masterpieces that were expected of him. With
Midnight
, he had to show all his cards and take the consequences.

The Other Side of Midnight
occupied an unprecedented three adjacent sound-stages where Ken Adam’s sets for Bistritz and Borgo Pass and the exteriors and interiors of Castle Dracula were constructed. John Huston shaved his beard and let his moustache sprout, preparing for the acting role of his career, cast apparently because Welles admired him as the Los Angeles predator-patriarch Noah Cross
(Chinatown,
1974). It has been rumoured that the seventy-four-year-old Huston went so far as to have transfusions of vampire blood and took to hunting the Hollywood night with packs of newborn vampire brats, piqued because he couldn’t display trophies of his ‘kills’. Other casting was announced, a canny mix of A-list stars who would have worked for scale just to be in a Welles film, long-time associates who couldn’t bear to be left out of the adventure and fresh talent.

There were other vampire movies in pre-production, other
Dracula
movies, but Hollywood was really only interested in the Welles version.

Finally, it would happen.

After a single day’s shooting, Orson Welles abandoned
The Other Side of Midnight.
Between 1981 and his death in 1985, he made no further films and did no more work on such protracted projects as
Don Quixote
. He made no public statement about the reasons for his walking away from the film, which was abandoned after John Huston, Steven Spielberg and Brian DePalma in succession refused to take over the direction.

Most biographers have interpreted this wilful scuppering of what seemed to be an ideal, indeed impossibly perfect, set-up as a final symptom of the insecure, selfdestructive streak that had always co-existed with genius in the heart of Orson Welles. Those closest to him, notably Oja Kodar, have argued vehemently against this interpretation and maintained that there were pressing reasons for Welles’s actions, albeit reasons which have yet to come to light or even be tentatively suggested.

As for the exposed film, two full reels of one extended shot, it has never been developed and, due to a financing quirk, remains sealed up, inaccessible, in the vaults of a bank in Timişoara, Romania. More than one cineaste has expressed a willingness to part happily with his immortal soul for a single screening of those reels. Like Rosebud itself, until those reels can be discovered and understood, the mystery of Orson Welles’s last, lost
Dracula
will remain.

Sections of this novel have appeared, in slightly different form, disguised as novellas. Thanks are due to editors Stephen Jones (‘Coppola’s Dracula’), Pete Crowther (‘Andy Warhol’s Dracula’), Marvin Kaye (‘The Other Side of Midnight’), Ellen Datlow (‘Castle in the Desert’) and Paula Guran (‘You Are the Wind Beneath My Wings’). Others who rate a credit include Pete and Dana Atkins, Nicolas Barbano, Anne Billson, Sebastian Born, Randy and Sara Broecker, Kat Brown, Eugene Byrne, Susan Byrne, Pat Cadigan, Sophie Calder, Loretta Culbert, Les Daniels, Fay Davies, Alex Dunn, all at
Empire,
Dennis (aka Jack Martin) and Kris Etchison, Martin Feeney, Leslie Felperin, Larry Fessenden, Jo Fletcher, Martin Fletcher, Barry Forshaw, Neil Gaiman, Lisa Gaye, the late Charlie Grant, Jon Courtenay Grimwood, Antony Harwood, Jennifer Handorf, Georgina Hawtrey-Woore, Sean Hogan, Alan Jones, Yung Kha, Jonathan Kinnersley, Nick and Vivian Landau, James Macdonald Lockhart, Donna and Tim Lucas, Paul McAuley, Maitland McDonagh, Maura McHugh, Glenn McQuaid, Helen Mullane, the NECON 99 crew, Julia and Bryan Newman, Sasha and Jerome Newman, Marcelle Perks, Sarah Pinborough, David Pirie, David Pringle, Robert Rimmer, Silja Semple, Adam Simon (the real one, not the character in
The Player),
Helen Simpson, Russell Schechter, David Schow (who took us to Bronson Canyon), all at
Sight & Sound,
David J. Skal, Brian Smedley, Mike and Paula Smith, Somtow Sucharitkul (as S.P Somtow, author of
Vampire Junction),
Cath Trechman, Doug Winter and Jack Womack.

The library of books consulted includes, but is not limited to: Anna Abrahams,
Warhol Films
; Patricia Altner,
Vampire Readings: An Annotated Bibliography
; Rafael Alvarez,
The Wire: Truth Be Told
; William Amos,
The Originals: Who’s Really Who in Fiction;
Nina Auerbach,
Our Vampires, Ourselves
; Steven Bach,
Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate
; Nicolas Barbano,
Verdens 25 hotteste pronostjerner;
Barbara Belford,
Bram Stoker: A Biography of the Author of Dracula;
Peter Biskind,
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls;
Victor Bockris,
The Life & Death of Andy Warhol, NYC Babylon: From Beat to Punk;
Marlon Brando, with Robert Lindsey,
Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me;
Matthew Bunson,
Vampire: The Encyclopedia;
Glennis Byron (ed),
Dracula: Contemporary Critical Essays;
Simon Callow,
Orson Welles: The Road to Xanadu;
Robert L. Carringer,
The Making of Citizen Kane;
Raymond Chandler,
The Long Good-Bye;
Wensley Clarkson,
Quentin Tarantino: Shooting From the Hip;
Steven Cohan, Ina Rae Hark (ed),
The Road Movie Book;
Terry Comito (ed),
Orson Welles, Touch of Evil;
Eleanor Coppola,
Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now;
Francis Ford Coppola, James V Hart,
Bram Stoker’s Dracula: The Film and the Legend;
Peter Cowie,
Coppola, The Godfather Book;
Mike Davis,
City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles;
Mark Dawidziak,
The Columbo Phile: A Casebook;
John Gregory Dunne,
Monster: Living Off the Big Screen;
James Ellroy,
My Dark Places;
Dennis Etchison,
The Dark Country;
Robert Evans,
The Kid Stays in the Picture: A Hollywood Life;
Charles Fleming,
High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess;
David Flint,
Babylon Blue: An Illustrated History of Adult Cinema;
Karl French,
Bloomsbury Film Guide: Apocalypse Now;
Otto Friedrich,
City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s;
George Galloway, Bob Wylie,
Downfall: The Ceausescus and the Romanian Revolution;
Joan Gordon, Veronica Hollinger (ed),
Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture;
Christopher Golden, Nancy Holder,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer: The Watcher’s Guide
; Ronald Gottesman,
Focus on Citizen Kane
; Phil Hardy, Dave Laing,
The Faber Companion to 20th-Century Popular Music;
Leonard G. Heldred, Mary Pharr (ed),
The Blood is the Life: Vampires in Literature
; Tod Hoffman,
Homicide: Life on the Screen;
James Craig Holte,
Dracula in the Dark: The Dracula Film Adaptations;
Stephen Jones,
The Essential Monster Movie Guide;
Lyndon W. Joslin,
Count Dracula Goes to the Movies: Stoker’s Novel Adapted, 1922-1995;
Pauline Kael, Herman J. Mankiewicz, Orson Welles,
The Citizen Kane Book
; David P. Kalat,
Homicide Life on the Street: The Unofficial Companion;
Stephen Koch,
Stargazer: Andy Warhol’s World and His Films;
Robert Phillip Kolker,
A Cinema of Loneliness;
Andy Lane & Paul Simpson,
The Bond Files;
Barbara Leaming,
Orson Welles: A Biography;
Clive Leatherdale,
Bram Stoker’s Dracula Unearthed;
Jon Lewis,
Whom the Gods Wish to Destroy... Francis Coppola and the New Hollywood;
Colin MacCabe, with Mark Francis, Peter Wollen (ed),
Who Is Andy Warhol?;
Joseph McBride,
Orson Welles;
David McClintick,
Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street;
Frank McShane,
The Life of Raymond Chandler
; Paula Mitchell James,
And Die in the West,
Greil Marcus,
Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century;
J. Gordon Melton,
The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead, The Vampire Gallery: A Who’s Who of the Undead, VideoHound’s Vampires on Video;
Russell Miller,
Bare-Faced Messiah: The Story of L. Ron Hubbard;
Peter Occhiogrosso,
Inside Spinal Tap;
Laurence O’Toole,
Pornocopia: Porn, Sex, Technology and Desire,
Anthony Petkovich,
The X Factory: Inside the American Hardcore Film Industry;
Julia Phillips,
You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again;
Michael Pye, Lynda Miles,
The Movie Brats;
James Riordan,
Stone: The Controversies, Excesses, and Exploits of a Radical Filmmaker;
Ed Robertson,
“This is Jim Rockford...”: The Rockford Files;
Robin, Liza, Linda and Tiffany,
You’ll Never Make Love in This Town Again;
Julie Salamon,
The Devil’s Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood;
Jon Savage,
England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock,
Jack Sergeant,
Born Bad;
David Simon,
Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, The Corner;
David J. Skal,
V is for Vampire: The A-Z Guide to Everything Undead;
Robert Sklar,
Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of American Movies;
Kent Smith, Darrell W. Moore, Merl Reagle,
Adult Movies;
Amy Taubin,
BFI Classic: Taxi Driver
; David Thomson,
A Biographical Dictionary of the Cinema
,
Overexposures: The Crisis in American Filmmaking
,
Suspects
,
Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles;
Keith Topping,
Slayer: The Totally Cool Unofficial Guide to Buffy;
Parker Tyler,
Magic and Myth of the Movies;
Ultra Violet,
Famous for 15 Minutes: My Years With Andy Warhol;
Andy Warhol,
Warhol’s America
(esp p. 25); Orson Welles, Peter Bogdanovich,
This Is Orson Welles;
Linda Williams,
Hard Core;
Mary Woronov,
Swimming Underground: My Years in the Warhol Factory;
Maurice Yacowar,
The Films of Paul Morrissey.
The bulk of the work on this novel was done before I came - along with the rest of the world - to rely on the internet as a research tool, but subsequent drafts have been shored up by resorting to the IMDb and Wikipedia; at one point, I had to look up one of my fictional characters online to check something I’d forgotten.